Myrtle Beach nonprofit’s CEO hiring was a comically unethical process

In the latest example of influential white people in Myrtle Beach handing golden tickets to other white people in Myrtle Beach, Jason Greene will be leaving Habitat for Humanity to head up the Myrtle Beach Downtown Alliance after a hiring process so opaque it feels wrong to call it a process at all.

Those charged with being good stewards of our money don’t much seem to care what you or I think about it. Maybe they watched the reports of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas being lavished with extremely expensive gifts from a conservative billionaire for the past two decades and people shrugging at the obvious corruption and decided there was no need for them to avoid even the appearance of impropriety locally, either.

Greene might be the right person to lead the Alliance. He may have been the most qualified, the most experienced, candidate available. But we’ll never know because he was handed the job through the back door instead of after the kinds of exhaustive searches designed to ensure that the best candidate emerges. Because of the overlapping of board members and other officials between the Alliance and Habitat, the stench of this development will stick to both organizations for the foreseeable future. An Alliance board member voted to make Greene CEO of that group and 20 minutes later was given Greene’s soon-to-be former job at Habitat at least in the short term. A “volunteer interim CEO” from Habitat was voted chairman of Alliance during his first board meeting, another rare and odd development. It’s all comically and transparently unethical.

They claim the moves had to be made quickly. Bunk. The moves were made because people who are comfortable with each other decided to toss aside ethical concerns despite millions of dollars of taxpayer money being at stake, not to mention decisions about development downtown that could ensure this place maintains its status as one of the country’s top tourist destinations or die on the vine.

Let me be frank: Talented Black people along the Grand Strand don’t get these types of opportunities under these kinds of circumstances. And yet the people who keep making these decisions swear up and down they are really in favor of merit, of guaranteeing that they identify the right person for the right job at the right time. But Myrtle Beach Mayor Brenda Bethune, a board member of the public-private non-profit Alliance, seemed offended that The Sun News’ Adam Benson had the temerity to ask her about the hiring process. She didn’t even bother to vote for Greene’s hiring.

It’s a joke, a sick joke.

Full disclosure: I’m married to Tracy Bailey, the CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of the Grand Strand and founder of the literacy non-profit Freedom Readers. I don’t speak for her. She can speak for herself quite well. But I’ve had an up-close view of what it took for her to navigate the Myrtle Beach-area non-profit world as a Black woman. She had to be excellent and credentialed to the hilt. She had to be steadfast. She had to prove her meddle a thousand times over. And she had to be ethical and above board every step of the way. Despite all that, she didn’t receive a 157% pay raise like Greene from a public organization without navigating a thorough process.

It did not matter she was clearly the best person to clean up the financial mess at the Boys & Girls Club left by the previous CEO after an embezzlement scandal. She still had to jump through the hoops that forced her to prove herself yet again. She wasn’t a member of the good ole boys club. She also understood that ethical leadership demands more and doesn’t take unethical shortcuts.

She had to prove she was “the right fit” while some among us are just assumed to be.

This story was originally published April 16, 2023 at 5:00 AM.